Chapter 2

I was up bright and early and ready to tackle the world. I'm always that way after a night of sex. Guys get tired, girls get energized, and in my case it always carried over to the next day. I didn't linger in bed and reluctantly get up. No, I was out of bed, showered, dressed, and made up, all set for whatever the day would bring.

We'd already had an "Incoming Students Orientation", so I knew where my classes were. I was on the college track, and that meant a heavy class load. I didn't have a locker, instead I had a pile of books, some study material—advanced reading—and so on. It was daunting for those who thought they'd just skate through, but my sister had warned me, and I was ready.

There'd been an "education bubble" in the preceding years, and it had finally burst. Parents openly wondered what their kids were getting for the large amounts of money they were shelling out. A lot of the problem had stemmed from the way colleges were funded.

In the past the funding had come from alumni and other things, such as the hospital at schools with a teaching one. A lot of states had "land grant" schools that had donated land, and other land they used to provide income. There was almost always money from the state legislatures, often provided with few strings. That had all changed when the Federal Government had gotten involved.

The Federal Department of Education had involved itself in funding colleges. The aim was to make college affordable for everyone. The unlooked for part was that with the money came administrators to make sure it was spent "properly". All of those bureaucrats sucked down money. Colleges also awarded themselves large increases in salaries, and the result had been a hiking of tuition for all concerned. Some schools even encouraged only out-of-state students because they could charge more.

All of this had come crashing down when the Federal Government went on an austerity program. A few court cases changed things, too. "Promote the general welfare" got stretched a little too tightly, and like a rubber band, it snapped. Quit a few educational programs sponsored by the Feds went out the window as they struggled to pay the bills. The result had been massive unemployment among bureaucrats, something almost unheard of.

I intended to go to Louisiana State ((Go Tigers!). It was a land-, water- and space-grant school with substantial properties gifted to the school by a leg9islature and governor back when they were available. LSU, I'm told, ran those properties like any rental property and garnered the income from them, while also being exempt from most taxes. When the "education bubble" popped, LSU weathered the storm in fine shape.

The other thing the Feds had done had been to water down high school educations. The original aim was that extra effort would be put on students who weren't up to speed. The Feds urged standardized testing, which meant teachers, who were aware that their funding depended on those tests, taught to the test rather than giving students a general education. That meant that pretty soon a high school diploma didn't get you into college. Instead you went to Community College and took the requisite classes.

At our Community College, Tri-Counties Community College, there were two tracks. The first was the trade school, where they taught you to be a car mechanic—it required a lot more skills than in the past—provided cooking classes to prep you for culinary school, and even held the necessary classes for your Apprentice Level in the trades. But there was also the College Track where you got the math, English, and other requirements that you needed to get into a four-year college. The good news was that you could usually skip your freshman year if you went to a community college.

The one thing a lot of parents liked at the Community College level was they could keep a close eye on their kids' education. This was important because there had been some professors at the larger schools who had viewed their classes as little more than an indoctrination opportunity. Students hadn't gotten an education so much as a political philosophy. During the fall-out from the bursting of the "education bubble", there had been a general sorting out of college level teachers. Schools with a heavily politicized faculty had gotten defunded by legislatures. Screams of outrage had sounded throughout the land, but the parents had a point, and the purse-strings. The press had sided with the professors, but it hadn't made much of a difference. Those who put politics ahead of an education soon found themselves unemployed.

There were schools that had sufficient funding from outside sources that that didn't happen. LSU was one of them, but politicians held hearings, and many a professor who spent class time teaching political philosophy instead of what they were supposed to be teaching had to justify themselves in front of unsympathetic legislators. The publicity did what defunding couldn't.

This hadn't percolated very far into the high school level yet. So I was faced with going to Tri-State for at least a year to get what high school should have taught me. I wasn't resentful of that, it was just how the game was currently played. If the truth came out, as it usually did, I was even looking forward to school. There were things I wanted to learn, and I either hadn't had the opportunity, or I'd been actively discouraged. This was going to be my chance to make up for lost time.

I'd cruised through Orientation so I knew where to park, where to check in on the first day, and so on. In no time I was lugging my books around—note to self, find better way to handle the books—and facing College Algebra.

Now strictly speaking I didn't need Algebra for my intended major. But if you look good all across the board on your grades and classes, you stand a better chance of getting accepted. Besides, I'd paged through the textbook, and they mentioned "imaginary numbers" such as the square root of minus one, the Federal Government's Budget, and things like that. I knew I just had to take the class.

And found it deadly dull.

The problem was the instructor. He spoke in a monotone with an even cadence that would put a caffeine junkie to sleep in no time. I actuall6y heard snores from around me on that first day. I was still kind of pumped up, and it struck me that I was going to have to get plenty of dick if I was going to face this the first thing every morning.

History was an eye-opener. In high school one of the teachers had painted the US as this imperialist behemoth astride the world. US History gave a different picture, one that was decidedly at odds with what I'd originally been taught. This was more like it.

I'd taken French in high school, sort of a natural in Louisiana, and my third of five classes was a little more advanced than I'd expected, but I was here to get pushed. I wasn't here to party and make the social scene, that I already had handled. So I practiced my lip and tongue action, important things in my social activities. I also practiced my French vowels. Those were important, too.

I'd had to have an elective, and Mother had suggested public speaking. It wasn't because either of us expected me to speak in public, but the self=confidence you gain from standing in front of a room of people is immeasurable. We had to speak on that very first day, and I followed some advice I'd read in a magazine: I pictured every one of them class naked. Of course that led to certain salacious thoughts, ones I didn't share with my fellow students.

English Literature can be very boring, but American Literature sounded more interesting. I was loaded down with the Complete Short Works of Mark Twain as part of the class reading assignment. It was a little more than I expected for my first day.

"Welcome to the real world," my sister Krys said when I got home. She was a year older than me and was about to start at LSU. "You're probably only a week behind, and you've only been there one day. Trust me, it gets harder."

"Such encouraging words," I told her. "I'll treasure them forever."

She stuck her tongue out at me and went back to her book. A lot had changed since she had started school. I'd thought her about as shallow as a mud puddle, and in some ways she was, at least in high school. But Tri-State had changed something in her, and now she was reading her English Lit textbook from cover to cover before her classes started. I had a sister with a previously unknown serious side, and I was still trying to get used to it.

I had a more immediate concern: Eric was leaving for Georgia Tech, and I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible. I'd hoped he would go to Tri-State and then LSU, but he'd wangled some sort of scholarship to Georgia Tech, and he was headed off to engineering school. I had this consolation, he was going to be so busy with his studies that he wouldn't have time for a social life. I kept telling myself that as we went on an actual date that didn't involve naked bodies. This was a nice dinner, a movie in a theater, and so on.